Chapter Text
Breathe in for luck, breathe in so deep
This air is blessed, you share with me
This night is wild, so calm and dull
These hearts, they race, from self control
The cable was fine. Pond had checked it himself, twice, the way he checked everything because Phuwin never did.
He’d said so backstage, an hour before doors, both of them sitting on upturned equipment cases in a hallway that smelled like rubbers and extension cords, waiting their turn in a battle of the bands neither of them had planned on taking seriously until the actual prize money got mentioned.
Check it before you plug in.
Phuwin had waved him off with his mouth full of convenience store rice, said something like, “It worked yesterday,” in the tone of a man who considered that a complete argument.
“Yesterday isn’t today.”
“You worry too much.”
“I worry exactly the right amount. You just don’t like being told what to do.”
Phuwin had grinned at him around a mouthful of rice, unbothered, and said, “That’s also true,” and that had been the end of it, because arguing with Phuwin once he’d decided something was a waste of breath Pond didn’t have to spare before a set. He always let it go, right up until the moment it turned out he shouldn’t have.
🐻🐼🐻🐼
Apollo played first that night. Ten minutes, the way most student band sets were forgettable, except that Pond spent most of his own set glancing offstage toward where TapeGuy was waiting to go on, because that was just what he did now, had been doing for the better part of a year without ever quite admitting to himself when it had started.
TapeGuy went on. Second song, four bars in, the sound cut out.
Pond didn’t decide to move. He was already moving. Ducking under a monitor wedge, crossing a stage that wasn’t his, because Apollo’s bassist had no professional reason to be standing in the wings of a rival band’s set unless something had gone wrong enough to justify it, and something clearly had.
He crouched by the pedalboard. Found the loose jack in about four seconds, the exact jack he’d told Phuwin to check, and reseated it with more force than the cable actually needed.
He was not thinking about the crowd. He was thinking about the flicker that had crossed Phuwin’s face in the half second before he’d covered it with a grin, that specific, private kind of panic Pond had learned to recognize months ago and hated every time he saw it, hated it enough that his jaw had gone tight without asking his permission first.
He fixed it and put a flat hand against Phuwin’s back for exactly one second, the kind that meant you’re fine, keep going, and then he walked off exactly without looking at the crowd once.
Someone’s phone caught eleven seconds of it. Just the crossing, the crouch, the expression on his way back off, nothing before or after to explain it. Bassist storms onto rival band’s stage mid-song, face like he wants to put someone through the floor.
Nobody’s phone caught the hand on the back. Nobody was pointed at that.
🐻🐼🐻🐼
After the set, a kid with a lanyard from the university paper caught Phuwin backstage, notebook already flipped open. “What happened with Apollo’s bassist during your set?”
Phuwin was still riding the specific humiliation of having been right in front of, and wrong in front of, the same person. He wasn’t angry. He was embarrassed, which on him looked almost identical to angry if you didn’t know him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Ask him.”
That was the whole quote. Four words and a shrug the kid’s notebook didn’t have room for.
It ran three days later under a headline that kept the ask him and lost the shrug entirely, with a single line near the bottom nobody thought twice about at the time: Apollo had taken first place that night, TapeGuy placing second behind them.
TAPEGUY VOCALIST REFUSES TO COMMENT ON APOLLO BASSIST INCIDENT.
Neither of them read it that week. They were too busy in Pond’s dorm room, where Phuwin was still complaining that Pond had made a scene, and Pond was saying he’d rather make a scene than watch him get electrocuted by a cable he’d been told twice to check, and Phuwin was saying that wasn’t what would have happened, and Pond was saying it was exactly what would have happened, eventually, if Phuwin kept ignoring him.
“You looked like you wanted to kill me,” Phuwin said, flopped sideways across Pond’s bed like he owned half of it, which by then he more or less did.
“I wanted to fix your cable.”
“You looked like both.”
“I can want two things.”
“You also won,” Phuwin said, not quite done being sour about it. “Your set was fine and mine had a hole in the middle of it where the sound used to be, and somehow you’re the one who gets to be smug tonight.”
“I’m not smug.”
“You are extremely smug. Extremely, quietly smug, which is worse.”
Phuwin laughed, not the stage one, and reached over without looking to steal the last of whatever Pond was eating, and Pond let him take things without asking because there had never really been a point where Pond refuses him anything now.
Neither of them thought there was a story in it. It was just a Tuesday. It was just Phuwin being reckless with equipment and Pond being unable to help himself about it, the same shape their whole relationship had already settled into and would keep settling into for years, long after the rest of the world decided it meant something else entirely.